OSS Renaissance
The OSS ''Renaissance ''NCV-58235 is a massive'' Renaissance-''class battlestar commissioned into the New Ossyrian Stellar Navy in 104 AF. Intended to be a testbed for new technologies as much as it is a titantic dreadnought, it stands as the flagship of the NOSN and is equipped with the absolute best cutting-edge technology available in the Southern Rim, captained by a Karsian-born veteran and currently leading the Ninth Sector Fleet in the continuing battle for Amaterasu. History Development The blueprints for what became the ''Renaissance-class were first drawn up in 86 AF, while the ''Appalachia''-class Battlestar was under construction. Originally conceived to be a larger version of the Appalachia for use primarily as a mobile command center for larger Ossyrian fleets, the class was still in the early design stages during the Fall of Ossyria, and only one copy survived in an offworld Hayakawa Tech database. Though it was rediscovered some years later while HT was scouring it's databanks for new vessels to arm it's private security forces with, the sheer estimated cost combined with the far greater feasibility of smaller and cheaper Appalachia-class ships as battlestars caused the design to be stored away and more or less forgotten. The nature of Hayakawa Executive Security's, and soon the New Ossyrian Stellar Navy's mission as a peacekeeping force mainly tasked with battling pirates and marauders drove a mentality of smaller, more versatile vessel with which the Renaissance simply did not mesh. In 102 AF, NOAF military thinking shifted the opposite direction. With the overwhelming Travesti assault on Canaan it became clear that the previous NOSN strategy of maintaining smaller fleets of light, high-tech vessels would only prove fatal against their new enemy; the only way to meet the Dominion's overwhelming military might was with heavy hitters able to survive the incredible pounding Travesti warships could unleash. HT engineers scrambled to come up with new weaponry, vehicles and starships able to meet the vast new threat, and in the process rediscovered the plans for the Renaissance. Almost immediately the NOR's best engineers, including HT's Head of Engineering Design Alliana Wastia herself, were assigned to upgrading the designs into blueprints for a feasible Heavy Battlestar able to go toe-to-toe against a Travesti Crxxes-Class Battleship and lead whole NOSN fleets into the massive battles that ensued over Canaan, and that could be online and ready for combat within three years. Through a combination of panic-driven energy, NOMI's quietly pulling resources from across the galaxy into the process, and brilliance on par with the scientists who develop Earth's first atomic weapon centuries prior, within only two years the OSS Renaissance rolled out of drydock over New Ossyria. Service Immediately after being cleared for duty in 104 AF, the ship was assigned a massive crew consisting of the best the NOAF had to offer, totaling over 25,000 veterans from every branch of the military and led by Captain Melissa Soutter, already considered a war hero in both the Northern and Southern Rims and one of the few officers to have battled Travesti on Karsol some years earlier. In June the Renaissance arrived over Canaan, triggering the last naval skirmish of the Siege as Dominion naval forces launched an all-out assault intended to test this new enemy vessel's capabilities. What followed was the only absolute slaughter of Travesti forces to occur during the entire two-year siege. Supported by thousands of upgraded NOSN warships and boasting an armament unlike anything the Dominion had faced since they last battled the Seraphim, the Renaissance obliterated hundreds of Dominion vessels with hardly any damage sustained to itself; rather than the week-long naval battle that had occurred early in the Siege, the New Ossyrian fleet pushed back the Travesti within the space of a few hours and knocked out nearly 2,000 enemy vessels. The sheer morale boost shifted the entire Siege in favor of the NOR, leading to the first instance shortly thereafter NOAF troops planetside actually retaking and holding lost ground. Now ensuring that the naval situation was secure, the Renaissance's presence helped keep the Travesti from attempting another naval incursion for three months. In late September, said next incursion occurred when the Travesti were lured into landing on Canaan's sole moon after NOAF forces suddenly abandoned the garrison there and deactivated all automated defenses. The bait for Operation Bluff Call was taken hook, line and sinker, and the Renaissance delivered the master stroke by instigating the only combat usage of a Mikalovich Warhead in history, annihilating the moon with one strike and instantly wiping out the Travesti Seeker Fleet sent to investigate. Finally convinced that the Siege was no longer worth the required resources, the Dominion retreated from NOR space entirely; in the ensuing celebrations, the Renaissance and her crew was hailed as the biggest damn heroes of their country and thrown incredibly lavish parties in a multi-billion person victory party on New Ossyria only weeks later. When the parties ended and normal life began to resume, the Renaissance was diverted in 105 AF to active service along the increasingly UFSR-NOR border, mainly to counter the recent deployment of the Federation's massive Goliad-class Battlestars to that same region. It has since remained there acting as the flagship of the NOSN, as well as the mobile command center of the NOAF's Border Security Force. Murmurs of the hellfire that would be unleashed if the Renaissance ever faced the [[SFS Big Brother|SFS Big Brother]] remain a popular subject of rumor among NOAF sailors. Specifications Nothing on the ''Renaissance was ever intended to be small-scale, as proved by the massive size of every statistic and specification for the vessel. At over three kilometers in length and carrying more personnel and vehicles than can be found in many small Heartland towns, the vessel is a true feat of engineering simply in that it's able to avoid tearing itself apart every time it moves. Frame The skeleton of the Renaissance is built the highest-grade New Ossyrian duasteel framing available, reinforced by a highly experimental chitin-like material developed from the recovered hulls of destroyed Travesti warships. Rigid enough to hold together the ship's incredible mass and nearly impossible to destroy with anything short of nuclear weapons, the frame had to be specially made simply to ensure standard sublight travel would not tear the ship apart. Strong though it may be, NOAF engineers would be hesitant to let the ship run without it's advanced structural integrity field absorbing much of the kinetic force the vessel's mass puts on itself at any given moment. Defensive Systems In order to ensure survivability against the energy weapons used by Travesti Reaper Vessels, the hull of the Renaissance is an incredibly thick durasteel battle plate in a class by itself. Made specifically for the class, the 5-meter 57-REN is a triple-layered armor composed of a meter of a secretive superheating-resistant, self-cooling material sandwiched between a pair of two-meter high grade durasteel plates. During it's sole engagement with Travesti forces in June 104 AF, the 57-REN proved far more able to withstand the high-impact plasma weaponry employed by the Dominion, as shown by the lack of any hull breaches that occurred in combat. In addition to the advanced hull, the Renaissance is equipped with a high-end energy shield based on Lykofan designs. Unlike many shield models used on other larger NOAF vessels, the SRCS-12 has the ability to vary it's strength depending on the current needs of the vessel and available power. Testing has shown the shield systems to be able to handle both several days running on low power to protect the vessel from stellar radiation, as well as to withstand nuclear-level energy given a large temporary power boost. A third defensive layer exists in the form of the LONDON-class Point Defense System, a series of small laser emitters controlled by a 'dumb' AI on board the vessel. Utilizing the Renaissance's high-end sensor systems, the LONDON system targets incoming projectiles and using whichever one of the hundreds of emitters on the hull that's within range to knock it out of the sky. Though intended for use in neutralizing incoming missiles, it can also be used in combat against enemy vessels firing large quantities of smaller, railgun-size projectiles to drastically reduce what fire is able to reach the hull. It also goes without saying the system becomes utterly useless against energy weaponry. Power Systems Due to the massive power requirements for the Renaissance's many advanced systems, no less than fifteen specially-made LVG-REN Fusion Reactors are aboard the vessel. Though it can operate at regular combat capacity with only a third of it's generators online, all the reactors are generally run simultaneously with relatively small amounts of power drawn from each to keep the stress on the generators low. The Renaissance is as close as a starship can get to a gas hog, requiring more nuclear fuel each year than most minor space stations. So much expended fuel is produced by the ship's reactors that in 109 AF a series of radioelectric generators were installed in order to allow some use of the waste material and reducing how often the ship must travel to a gas giant to dump their nuclear waste. Suggestions have been made that if a safe, feasible version of the theoretical SRG can be developed, it would provide a much more effective alternative to the high-demand reactors. Propulsion Perhaps the only 'low-tech' component of the Renaissance, the HTMHE-290 Hyperdrive is simply a larger, more advanced version of the standard hyperdrives found on other NOSN warships. The same principle is used with the 290 that it utilized by all hyperdrives across the galaxy: shifting the vessel into a 'higher' dimension of space wherein an object's mass does not increase exponentially near the speed of light, allowing it to accelerate far beyond what's possible in normal space. The similarly standard HTMSE-72 Sublight Drive allows acceleration up to one tenth the speed of light in normal conditions. The Renaissance is also equipped with an as-of-yet untested new form of FTL propulsion, the highly experimental Wastia-class Subspace Rift Drive, or SRD. Named for designer Alliana Wastia, the principle of the drive is utilizing the creation of a small Wastia-Mikalovich Subspace Rift in order to enter subspace, wherein there is no increase of mass with velocity; in theory, a ship could accelerate to a literally infinite speed. Due to the extremely unstable nature of W-SMRs, the possibility of catastrophic damage to the fabric of subspace and the likelihood that any vessel would be torn apart inside subspace by the incredible turbulence, no test of the SRD has been carried out. It's presence on board the Renaissance is more or less a "might as well" decision; in all likelihood proper testing will be carried out with drones before the ship's SRD is ever needed for an emergency. Onboard AIs Six Artificial Intelligences are equipped to the Renaissance, two of which are true AIs only legal in the galaxy now that the Empire and it's anti-synthetic laws have fallen: YURI, the ship's main battle AI, and AMY, a secondary intelligence taksed with background management of all non-combat systems. Four more 'dumb' SIRI-class AIs are delegated with various other, minor tasks, with two each directly working under the ship's smart AIs. For security reasons, all six are stored on the most secure shipboard servers in the galaxy and hard-coded to be loyal to the NOR; any attempt to override this loyalty would trigger an automatic self-erasing. Armament Having been designed to face down virtually any threat thrown against the NOR as a front-line warship leading in any and all assaults, the ''Renaissance is armed to the teeth with some of the most hard-hitting weaponry available in the galaxy. Anti-Fighter Weaponry The hull of the Renaissance is bristling with well over 1200 anti-fighter batteries of various classifications. The leading majority of these emplacements are 50mm ONC-90 Point Defense Cannons, eight-barreled railguns each capable of unleashing thousands of rounds every minute. Supplementing these projectile weaponns are over three hundred ONC-55r Plasma Repeaters, older guns designed for the Royal Ossyrian Navy that have been refit to serve as highly effective anti-missle and anti-bomber weapons. For larger targets close-range targets such as gunships and light corvettes, a series of 250 OAFS-55 Missile Batteries are capable of unleashing high quantities of more explosive firepower. Anti-Capital Weaponry In most situations, the Renaissance's massive series of Mark XII Ares Missle Pods will be able to unleash all of the firepower it might need for dealing with anything between a frigate and a full-scale battleships. Larger targets such as stellar installations, enemy battlestars, and especially Travesti dreadnoughts, will sometimes necessitate the use of the four HMAC-35 Magnetic Accelerator Cannons; these enormous guns are some of the largest MACs in the galaxy, coming in at just over two kilometers in length and each capable of accelerating a projectile up to 15% the speed of light. The 120 EPOCH-class warheads maintained in the ship's armories are little more than large quadranium chunks that impact a target with the force of a thermonuclear detonation. Should genuine nuclear firepower be required, sixteen Lincoln-class warheads are available at all times as well. Anti-Stellar Body Capabilities Easily the most devastating among the vessel's armament is its compliment of Mikalovich Warheads, the most devastating weapons utilized by the NOR and one of the few things that can cause a Travesti invasion force to pause and consider retreat. Rather than unleash massive amounts of explosive power, these warheads create brief rifts in the barrier between normal space and the chaotic dimension of subspace; during the fifteen seconds or so during which the rift is open, tremendous gravitational force on par with a black hole will draw anything nearby into a hellish miasma of ionic lightning and zeta radiation that nothing in the known galaxy can survive. The sheer power of these weapons is such that, in every instance of one being used against a moon or planet, the entire stellar body was annihilated, as was the case with the crude forefather to these devastating warheads that resulted in the still-raging Brimstone Rift. Yet even the eight Mikalovich Warheads carried aboard the Renaissance are not it's most powerful weapons; this honor goes to the experimental, incredibly dangerous pair SCW-M2 of Star Collapsing Warheads it has quietly been equipped with. Unprecedented in the history of Mjolniran warfare, these explosives use a similar method to that of their Mikalovich cousins to initiate the premature death of a star via massive supernova. The sole test conducted by the weapon resulted in four uninhabited planets being annihilated, and despite the equipping of the Renaissance with two, the normally trigger-happy New Ossyrian Congress has given serious talks to a complete ban on the weapons and destruction of all research materials that led to their production. Category:Ships Category:New Ossyrian Republic